The first chunk that loaded was down to the hairline. I thought, "Wow, it's realistically painted!" Then we got the face, and I thought, "Well, the line art was cartoony, and the shading ain't bad..." Then as we moved lower and lower it was worked less and less, and was more and more "concept artish." Loosen up!!! Seriously now, let go and just loosely doodle for awhile. Let the colors and shapes take on their own life(no line drawing first). I think that would do you a world of good. Don't get me wrong Francis, I like your work. But I think loosening up substantially would substantially help your progression.

its funny that you mention your influence, because if you hadn't, thats the first thing i would have mentioned. the lighting, and background are very reminiscent of 'the milk maid'.

i'd say this could just use some more attention to detail on the figure. the face looks a little small & low on the head, and the eyes look very egyptian. (cool if thats what you're going for)

since the painterly influence is so strong on this picture, it would be cool to see you try to tackle some nice plush draperies for the clothing, rather than skin-tight spandex. it would go more with the feel of your influence.

Ok, first off I would have to say that this is not one of your stronger pieces, but then again, how are we to grow if we donít try something new, right?

Starting with the top, the head. You are giving the head a subtle turn to the head, she is not looking straight at us, but she has a lot of head mass laterally, as if she was looking straight at us. With this in mind there are a number of things not quite right with the face, one of them being the murkier fleshtones used. Study Vermeer a bit more closely, he actually warms up his flesh tones moreso than you might think. Photos seem to usually subdue color especially when it is so subtle as his colors tend to become, especially in his toning of flesh. The nose is pretty out of whack, with a rather large nostril. She is looking more down than not, so there would only be an indication for where the nostril would be located, but no nostril directly in view. The bridge of the nose seems a bit weak, being a very generic line, vs. any contour. But this could also be played as a character type, so I donít argue this bit as much.
The center of your lips are off, they are not centered to the frontal facial plane. And the eyes are too outlined, almost like a goth girl would do to herself when applying makeup. The shape of the eyes are also wrong. The high point of the upper lid is always harmonious to the pupil or the lens of the eye. Being a lens, it protrudes from the eye sphere slightly, causing the upper lid buldge over in this location.

She has no neck, but again, she is slumped over so most of the neck would be hidden. Still, in relation to your anatomy, she has a stumpy neck.

I know you like this type of girl, but the very broad shouldered woman is really unattractive to the majority of people out there, i.e. an audience. They(the audience) find broad shoulders on a woman to be intimidating, not sexy. This coffee drinker is very yoked in her shoulders, but then slenders out quite a bit in the arms, making the shoulders look a bit out of place in character.

The breasts to me look like the bottom plane of the ribcage, or the turning of the abdomen under the rib cage. There is no chest volume, unless she is flat chested in character type, and if she is, then the stomach needs to be better resolved.

The hand in shadow is too stumpy, she looks like she is missing her index finger, and the wrist is way to kinked. You have to sharp an angle in the wrist, with no other complementary angles in the image to help balance the shape. She also seems to be lacking the rest of her thumb.

The other arm is out of perspective in one way or another. In one instance, she may actually have her arm swung out in front of her, in the other instance, she could have her coffee hand out in front of her, with no crossing over the chest area. In either case, the arm perspective or the hand perspective is off a bunch. You need to decide which way you plan on taking that arm, and set it all up accordingly. I hope this paragraph made sense, because both the arm and the hand look fine, but they donít match up together in the same image.

Moving along, if the arms are as long as they are on your character, then her legs need to increase in length by at least a 10-20% to balance all the proportions out. The way her belly tucks into her beltline looks funky too. No overlapping of the abbs over the belt line, it doesnít quite look convincing.

And her feet look really funny. She has no heels. Her heels are under the leg mass. There should be a good amount of foot behind the calf insertion, as the foot is the balance point when we stand. If you think about it, we would have a very difficult time standing if we didnít have any foot mass behind our leg. We would all have to lean forward considerably to stay standing. A good session studying feet should cure this dilemma.

The colors of the painting are very pasty. You are using too much white in everything. Some of Vermeers paintings tend to lean toward high key, but this doesnít mean adding white to everything. Adding white in computer language is strange, since you really arenít adding white, you are just picking a different hue with saturation and value imbedded into it already. Also, your painting history leans more toward watercolors, so even in that training, you arenít using white paint. My recommendation to really help you here is to go buy some paints, acrylics or gouache, but something relatively inexpensive. GO out, get these colors, some throw away Bristol board, and go to town painting swatches of color. Paint the swatches of colors in value scales, and only add white to the colors, do not add black. Try this, then do the same thing, only mix your colors together first in a controlled percentage, then again add white to the mixture, slowly, painting up on your board a value chart again with these new mixtures, till you see the effect white has on color, and why white can destroy a nice painting early on if injected to soon.
Here is an example. Go buy red, blue, yellow and white. Paint each color in a square across the top of your board, with no color mixture or addition of white. Next, under each of those colors, add four more squares and slowly add white to each of the colors, and paint down that mixture accordingly. So, under your blue chip for example, you will have four more values of the same blue, but with a portion more white added to each square until what you are left with is a very pale blue. In most painting, you want to limit the number of values you paint with, so for the same sake of clarity, we use only five chips per value scale.
Once this has been done with all three of your colors, then mix again as an example, mix blue to both the yellow and the red, and paint this mixture into your chip. Then, again, add white to the color mixture in parts, until you have done again a value scale, only using your new mixtures.
(I use the terms swatch, chip and square all as the same thing, sorry for using so many different descriptions for the same thing. And why are we only using white, and not adding black? In most painting, you really donít need to add black. Mixing dark colors with dark colors will ultimately make a black harmonious to the color scheme you are painting with. But, this isnít to say you canít use black. Just saying it within the theory I am laying out here.

One thing I was taught by all my painting instructors is to keep white off your palette until it is absolutely necessary to add. Using it early on in an incomplete image might give the illusion that you problem has been solved, only to find that when the image is complete that the areas the white was added to are now to creamy and lacking any strength or punch because the white has bleached those colors out.

Back to your painting, I think the background color chosen is a bit too bland, and doesnít quite hold up too strongly. It has a muted color to it, and tends to make flesh look very zombie like. Not warm and inviting. The colors you chose for the warms on her arms are a bit too greenish also. Unless you are doing an effect, like the room is lit with indirect sun, but direct lush bounce light, you really want to stay away from deathly looking colors in the flesh tones. Again, this is only a suggestion in terms of painting a beautiful girl, we arenít talking every painting you do. Spooge used a great green base in the flesh tones of Vortxís warrior girl a while back, and it works great. But it was in the cooloer, darker tones, not in the highlighted areas. Bottom line, just be careful with the colors you choose.

The blue on her stretch pants seems to be too electric, or shocking blue. With the palette you used, you would think that the blue color would be very desaturated, and not so stark. As it stands, the blue on her pants jumps out and bites before anything else in the painting. Adjustments should be made here too.

Hope I wasnít too demolishion team on this painting. You did after all ask for the schooling. SoÖ

A good thing to think about this with paintings like this, is that you are too burdened by too much info, and this causes decision making to faulter a bit, thinking too much about new things that will change you natural habits quite a bit, thus possibly causing problems in the approach to the finished piece. Nothing wrong with this, in fact it is a good thing. It means that you might possibly be on your way to another breakthrough in your own work.

Wow, uhhh, can I be your apprentice or something, Ron? It's a critical eye like yours that I crave when working on my own stuff.

Seriously though, I only wish I was working in your area so I could take some classes under someone with your ability to do and teach (from what I can discern from your posts on these boards). Yeah, I know harsh critiques can hurt but I would rather get it told to me straight than to be patted on the back when I know there's something wrong but I can't..quite..find what it is.

Francis, I think Ron already went through anything and everything that could be fixed or kept in mind for your next piece. I'll say that I like the way your style works on this woman's head and I like the lighting you've given the subject. I like the pose, too.

The colors seem to be a bit too muddy, much like my own get if I'm not paying attention (and sometimes when I am ). That's probably in part or all because of what Ron was talking about. I'll have to try those experiments myself sometime. Also, I could be wrong, but it might be nice to see some squash in her legs and butt where she's sitting down unless she's built as hard as a rock. That's getting pretty damn picky but I'm just trying say what's coming to mind here.

I hope to see this updated or a completely new piece soon man, your stuff rocks. Just remember that you sometimes take one step back to go two steps forward. Keep the artwork coming man.

-Flinthawk

[This message has been edited by Flinthawk (edited January 12, 2001).]

That's what I call a beating!
All that for a telephone doodle that was quickly painted? Man!

Come one Francis, can't you be Michelangelo or Da Vinci, or something? You suck!

Next time Francis, you will be crucified for your sins!

Hahaha

I quite like the pic, although I don't like the kind of 'dirty' brush strokes. Doesn't seem to go well with your style. I prefer your cleaner work, but I still like this one (especially the linework - simple and effective).

Nah, I specifically asked Ron to give me a beating. This was one great crit - it was a quick drawing, but I was trying something new, and I stumbled (pretty hard from the looks of it). But that's OK - this is how you get better (hopefully).

Thanks for the feedback - I think you will see this piece again in some form in the near future.

Things I did learn from this:

I was trying to portray a natural lighting condition, i.e. one that is not typically a cinematic lighting treatment. I've had a tendency to rely on a limited set of ideas for lighting, which basically are movies and Craig Mullins paintings (which is by no means a bad thing). And Craig I hope you don't take offense at that - I think your movie-influenced stuff is so striking to people of our generation, because we've grown up with that being a huge influence on the way we see and make art.

With this I was trying to portray a lighting setup that didn't involve an extreme cool light with an extreme warm reflected light. One thing that really hurt the painting was the half assed sketch underneath. Even if the rendering were extremely realistically done (which it wasn't), the end result suffers from the lack of a good underlying structure.

Another weak area for me is color composition, which is why I stuck (or tried to stick!) so closely to Vermeer's color choices - so I could get some clue from his choices, but without literally sampling his colors. Obviously I still need practice in that area, but it made me pick colors I would not have otherwise considered. I do need to do the exercises Ron mentioned to understand more I think.

Hey Francis, just a thought, but when you mentioned that the underlying sketch hurt this piece it made me wonder if you've tried doing a piece without a sketch as a base. For a while I was always starting out from a sketch but when I tried a painting by starting with blocking in basic forms with midtones I found it to be a bit liberating and I really like the results much better than the stuff my line work produced.

Since then I've done a few images using linework as a base but I found that I didn't like 'conforming' to predefined lines. I guess in some cases that's a good thing, to have a solid groundwork, but the same holds true the other way...being able to change stuff without having to worry about the lines produced a different way of thinking for me. Just thought I'd throw that out there since you're looking to do new things.